Overdose
by THELEGOMack
Summary: A dramatization of Hotline Miami's second chapter, as it was meant to be read. Part of a discontinued collaboration.


**_April 16, 1989_**

 ** _Miami, Florida_**

Jacket thrust open the door into the kitchen and leaned over the pizza box left out on the table. Two slices remained, and the thought of room-temperature pizza seemed more than a little enticing. Why was he always so hungry after waking up?

He hadn't gotten a wink of sleep since the previous night, as tumultuous as that had been, and tonight he had been turning over in bed for hours on end in a futile attempt to get some rest.

He sighed and turned away from the table as he thought of the one thing he wanted more than pizza.

Combing a hand through the wild pale-blond mess that was his hair, he groggily shuffled across the hall to the couch and sat down beside the end table, fishing through the open drawer for a pack of cigarettes.

Some kind of rush went through him when he noticed the small red light blinking on the answering machine—perhaps it was a shot of excitement, perhaps a twinge of anxiety—but he was certainly awake now. He slipped the newly discovered pack of cigarettes into his pocket, put the phone receiver up to his ear and played back the answering machine.

 _"You have one new message."_

 _"This is 'Thomas' from the methadone clinic. We've scheduled a short meeting for you tonight. We're at northwest 184th street, apartment 105. And don't worry, we know discretion is of importance to our clients."_

After a tense few seconds of silence, "Thomas" hung up and the message ended. Hesitantly, Jacket placed down the phone and glanced up at the clock on the far wall. He had no job to worry about at 12:09 on a Sunday morning, he had more important matters to attend to.

As he prepared to light the cigarette between his lips when he opened his apartment door, he almost stumbled over a package on the doorstep.

He slipped his lighter away and inspected the parcel more closely. The recipient address was his, all right, but the package was marked with the name "Tony" in black marker and devoid of any return address. He put it up to his ear and shook it. Whatever was inside, it was light, hollow and soft.

Why was the word "clandestine" coming to mind?

With a shrug, Jacket tucked the box under his arm and made his way down the stairs to the DeLorean. He flipped open the gull-wing door, threw the package onto the passenger seat and sat down at the wheel. It was time to flush out some commies.

His service in Hawaii came to mind, and he forced the thought away with a stern twist of the ignition key.

• • •

As he sat in his sports car, Jacket tore into the cardboard box on his lap and reached inside to find another rubber mask. Cautiously, he stepped out of the vehicle, spat out his spent cigarette butt and inspected his disguise in the moonlight. This new mask was an interesting one indeed: a snarling tiger. It looked like the kind of thing Jacket would have worn for Halloween when he was thirteen. He dropped his arms to his sides and peered at the sloppily painted insignia on the structure before him. With some trepidation, he put the mask on and closed the door of his DeLorean.

He trembled with dreadful anticipation and knocked on the apartment door. He was _knocking_ at the door of the hardened Russian criminals he was sent to whack? What kind of pussy was he turning into? He drew his fist back in an attempt to prove himself wrong.

The door opened to reveal a balding middle-aged man in a familiar white suit and blue shirt, auburn brow cocked skeptically.

"Who the fuck are you?" He muttered as Jacket let fly.

As soon as the young man's knuckles made contact, the mobster's jaw was smashed clear off and what remained of his skull twisted sideways with a nauseating crack. Spattered in blood, Jacket stumbled backward with a yelp.

 _Holy shit!_ He almost cried out loud.

A second gangster came around the corner at the end of the hall, shotgun in hand, and the initial shock Jacket was feeling gradually gave way to morbid wonder. What the hell was going on? Was this some kind of sleeplessness-induced hallucination? Was this some kind of dream? Whatever it was, it was more than a little empowering.

The shotgun-wielding criminal across the room had taken aim with his weapon, and Jacket ducked out of the doorway as a flurry of metal pellets embedded themselves in the wall and doorframe. He might have been able to punch a man's jaw off and break his neck with a single swing, but there was no way he could survive a shotgun blast in nothing but a letterman jacket and a t-shirt.

The man shouted something in Russian to a fellow mobster, and the two began expressing their horror at the condition of the door guard. Swiftly, Jacket dove into the doorway and attacked. He struck one gangster with a right hook, breaking open the side of his skull, and slammed another fist squarely into the other mobster's face with the force of a sledgehammer. Once his opponents were down, he gazed down at his bloodied hands in awe. Things were going to get—dare he think it—fun.

He snatched the discarded shotgun from the gore-soaked carpet and pumped the expired shell from the tube before slinging it under his shoulder—no telling what was in store for him on the next floor. A rifle bolt snapped back from behind him. Jacket whipped around and fired, blasting the arm from the Russian across the hall before he could attack. It was no time to muse, Jacket decided—he had a job to do.

He dashed into the hall and took a swing at one final mobster emerging from a bathroom before taking a left and bolting up a staircase to find himself in a narrow hallway leading to a kitchen. With newfound caution he crept inside, expecting some Russian gangster to pummel him with a baseball bat, but the room was surprisingly vacant. As he approached, he noticed a discarded slice of pizza left on a table—and immediately realized he forgot his own pizza back at his flat.

With a glance back at the door to apartment 105, Jacket carefully removed his mask—taking a moment to enjoy the feeling of dry, cool air on his sweaty face—and began eating the discarded pizza. The stuff was cheap and a bit tasteless, sure, but it was exactly what he needed. Once he was finished, the door to the apartment closed behind him and his heart skipped.

"Hands behind your head, _mudak,_ " growled a voice. Certain that a gun was trained on him, Jacket complied. "Turn around."

Jacket found himself facing not one, but two Russian mobsters at the door, one with a pistol trained between Jacket's eyes and the other with a hunting knife.

All because of a fucking pizza.

Jacket would have sighed in frustration if he wasn't sweating bullets. He glanced down at the tiger mask on the floor—a powerful weapon, he considered it—and wished that he could bash the sneers from these bastards' faces. The knife-wielding Russian forcefully grabbed Jacket's collar and cut the shotgun strap slung over his shoulder before shoving him back into a stove. Jacket recoiled his right hand in pain once it contacted the scalding hot surface.

"Ah, fuck!" He snarled, gripping his wrist.

The other Russian kept his pistol trained on Jacket's chest as he met him face-to-face.

"So," he said with a contemptuous scowl, "you must be one of those masked assholes."

 _'One' of them?_ Jacket wondered, but dared not speak his thoughts.

"Who do you work for? Answer me!" The Bolshevik snarled as he took Jacket's right hand and—at the same time his captive did—looked down at a pot of boiling water on the stove.

If Jacket was going to die, he wouldn't be telling the Russians a damn thing. With his free hand he hit his interrogator with a gut punch and grabbed the nearest weapon to him: the pot of water. In a fit of hysteria, he swung the boiling water into the standing gangster's face, sending him to the floor in agony, and beat the second one to death with the empty pot.

Panting and exhilarated, Jacket took his mask off the floor and took the dead mobster's pistol from his hand. His finger wasn't even on the trigger—they really wanted him alive. Jacket tucked the handgun in his pants and prepared to knock down the door.

 _You'll sure be getting me alive, all right._

With his fists of fury, he barreled into the door and bashed in one gangster's head before he could even get up off the couch he lounged in.

 _"You want me?"_ He roared as he kicked in a door and busted open another criminal's skull with a left hook, _"Come and get me!"_

One Russian ran at him with a lead pipe, only to have the side of his face caved in with the audible cracking of bone. Three more mobsters began shouting in Russian from a kitchen to Jacket's left, and he kicked open the door. One man was knocked to his back while the other two were quickly and messily executed. Swiftly, Jacket stooped over the incapacitated gangster and pounded his head into a mess of blood and gray matter with both fists. Damn, his hands felt like they were made of steel! He could tear apart the Soviet Union with his bare hands if he wanted to!

A kind of invincible fury ran through Jacket as he knocked down the door into a lounge and blasted away three armed gangsters with his silenced pistol. The stench of death came to him as he made his way to the door of a bathroom across the room—while noticeable, it wasn't sobering by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it fed his need for bloodshed.

With a crack of his knuckles, Jacket thrust open the door to find the final mobster staring in the mirror, distracted by a Walkman headset on his ears. Once he noticed Jacket, he stumbled back in terror and pulled off his headset.

Jacket grabbed a hunting shotgun leaning beside the doorframe before the Russian could take it and decided to put his newfound strength to the test—gripping one end of the weapon in each hand, he bent the tough metal barrels with surprising ease and tossed the useless weapon aside as the gangster looked on in horror, mouth agape.

Deciding to finish his mission, Jacket grabbed the man by his shaggy black hair and slammed his face into the mirror several times, sending bits of broken glass to the floor along with the freshly made corpse.

Jacket found himself sitting in the lounge and staring up at the ceiling fans as the red mist began to fade away. The stench of blood had grown overpowering, and he had to smoke cigarette after cigarette to calm his nerves. He looked down at his cigarette box and fingered the inside bitterly.

 _Damn, all out._

With a groan, he sat up—and collapsed again at the nauseating sight before him. Good God, how had he not noticed this before?

A dead man, stripped of all clothing but a walrus mask, was slumped over in a cheap wooden chair. He was covered in welts, bruises and cuts, clearly the products of brutal torture, but what truly made Jacket grimace were a pair of alligator clips—one attached to a car battery beneath the seat and the other to the man's exposed genitals.

Jacket could only imagine himself in such a situation as he left the apartment and fought the urge to vomit.

• • •

In an exhausted stupor, Jacket made his way through the video rental store and leaned over the front desk. With a cheerful grin, his friend Nicke adjusted his glasses and diverted his attention from the television on the counter.

"Hey, dude," he said, "good to see you. You feeling tired?"

"How'd you guess?" Jacket asked with a half-smile as a sudden lightheadedness overcame him. He leaned over the counter and shook his head as Nicke came around the counter with his chair and placed it down.

"Come on, Rich, grab a seat," he said worriedly as Jacket did so, and returned to his side of the counter. "So, did you hear about that massacre the other night?" A twinge of anxiety went through Jacket's spine, though he tried not to let it show. "A bunch of Russkies, I heard. No loss, if you ask me!" The two friends shared a chuckle as Jacket wagged his head again. "They say some maniac wearing a rubber mask did it. Sounds like a scene straight out of—!"

"Maniac?" Jacket echoed, "I heard that the Russians this guy killed were all criminals, part of the mafia. Who's to say he's not just serving his country?"

Nicke considered this as his eyes wandered to Jacket's right hand and widened in surprise.

"Whoa, what happened to your hand, dude?" He asked.

"I, uh, burned it on a hot stove," Jacket replied. "You got any ice?"

"No, but I've got this..."

Nicke reached into a cooler behind him, retrieved an ice-cold soda bottle and handed it to Jacket.

"That should do you good until you get back to your place," he said with a goodhearted smirk. "And, before I forget—" he reached across the counter and handed his friend a VHS tape, "—I have the perfect film for you. Take it, it's on the house."

"Thanks," Jacket said as he took his gifts and made his way to the door.

"Enjoy yourself, dude!" Nicke called after him.

Jacket slouched down in the driver's seat of his car and looked down at his tiger mask in the passenger seat with a sigh. Just a drive down the block and he could finally get some much-needed sleep.


End file.
